4 Bay NAS QNAP or Synology?

forgotmyname

Final straw with the DLINK NAS. Never been that impressed with it. Seemed like here it is and then ran away

and offered little support. Pointing me to a 3rd party site for the software addons. Had issues for a while where my

browser stated the NAS IP was unsafe. Added security certificates which worked for a whole week before failing

again. Now Windows failed to connect to it even with SMB1 enabled.

Needs to go but which one to choose? 

Do you use Raid 5 or SHR or equivalent?

Thanks

tacpot12

Your choice of RAID depends on whether you need better performance when reading or writing.
The choice between Synology or QNAP is immaterial unless you need a very specific feature which only one of them supports. 99.9% of the time, both will work well.  

forgotmyname

Thanks, just curious what people use and why they chose than brand.  Quick search shows that Synology is like Apple

with locked in Apps where the QNAP allows 3rd party Apps.  he only one I have seen mentioned is Kodi but as they

both use Plex that is not an issue for me.

My DLINK always appears to be offline when I wish to watch a video. Reset everything and it shows the files then click

play the server is offline..

Can either of these be setup to allow several users their own folders in a similar fashion to Onedrive?  Only allow

access to their folder and not the entire drives?  That would be handy and help me decide one over the other.

Thanks

a

unsure about plex, but I would get something like an 8 or 16 port sas and sata card off ebay - something ex-server reliability and put it into a box and purchase unraid. No tie-ins to a manufacturer or bespoke hardware or firmware.
https://www.snapraid.it/compare

dan958

I had many problems with my 4 bay qnap. I found that these NAS drives were expensive for the power you were getting (but are generally easier to use for people not as tech literate/ just want a plug n play)

I instead just bought a used HP microserver (gen 7), whacked in some drives and installed Unraid. Has worked like a dream for years.  (inc running of 4 docker containers, inc plex)

Neil_Jones

Think I mentioned this before but I just slapped one together with a Pi 4, an external USB "mobile" drive and a copy of Openmediavault.  Current uptime:  54 days, 6 hours.  Cheap and cheerful but it works.

forgotmyname

I did consider building one and using FreeNAS or Unraid, not heard of SnapRaid until now.  Advantage I do have

several computers sitting idle.

I could even go old school and use the dual CPU board (Dual Pentium 3 with massive heatsinks for passive cooling)

When I have seen people setting them up they always seem to be tinkering with them though.  I want a fit and forget unit.

The MicroServer maybe a halfway house on that but it uses way more power compared to the QNAP and Synology units.

New Gen10 Plus Entry is a similar price.

I have used a Raspberry Pi for KODI etc and it was OK but lacking a little for what I need now.

Thanks.

a

I love the idea of freenas, but if I remember rightly it wants stand alone drive controller, not a raid controller, so you either have to buy cheap cards or flash the bios of sever cards to disable raid, or use onboard sata.

Freenas does like memory, cant remember the gigs storage vs the gig ram numbers any more, then add extra if you want to dedup and do other stuff. and a decent processor is also good.

For me the killer of freenas was disk expansion, where you have to upgrade all the drives, but one by one, and you cant add extra drives. Freenas is far superior. Unraid you can just add another disk. Unraid is more my budget and is more workable, as you can include some redundancy.

My friend got stung with a Drobo san. His new samsung drive had a different version of firmware vs the old existing samsung drives and would not rebuild his raid array.

bobfredbob

Synology and QNAP say they support "docker" so you can install most sever apps such as Plex or Jellyfin even if they are not officially supported.

I'd start by determining how much storage you want, how important is it if it fails, how will you do a backup.

Linux supports "btrfs" which supports RAID and allows you to add extra disks when you need it and then "rebalance" the existing data over all the disks.  So, you don't have to say "I might need 100TB", instead you could start with 2TB and grow.  It also checksums the files to ensure then data is valid.

I'd avoid RAID5.  It's been considered deprecated for a long time since disks are so big nowadays so you run a risk of getting a second disk failure while trying to recover from the first failure.  In general, if you can afford it, RAID1 (mirror) is better since it is faster and easier to recover on a disk failure.

USB disks are fine until you get a problem.  Basically, they tend to have a "retry for a long time" logic if you get a disk corruption.  That's great if you're interactive, but not great for a server like Plex since it hangs waiting for the read to complete.  Whereas internal disks, especially NAS disks such as IronWolf, have different logic where they will return "fail" quickly since it's assumed the server will then get the data off another disk.  I'll also add that USB disks tend to overheat if you stress them a lot, such as doing a monthly "file check" of a ten TB drive.

Old PCs tend to use a lot of power compared to the Pi, etc.  So, if it is on a 24x7 then you'll probably add £50 or so to your annual bill.  Even if you buy a RAID card, you can usually use it as a non-RAID by just not creating RAID pairs on the controller.

If you use RAID then remember to factor in the recovery time after failure.  So, it's tempting to buy 2*10TB drive, but if one drive fails then it will take a very long time to re-write the replacement drive.  So, you may be better off with lots of smaller drives, depending on how critical your data is.

I find that NAS are ok as long as you are happy with their constraints and their (fairly) high costs.  But a server will have more flexibility.  Ubuntu have their (free) LTS (long term support) version which is five years, so at least you don't have the hassle of constantly upgrading the software and fiddling with config files.  Choose the server version if you want it minimal.  If I were doing it from scratch, I'd install any actual server software via docker so you can upgrade each program when you want to, leaving the actual server as minimal as possible.